On Our Evolving Knowledge of the Brain and Nervous System: An Interview with Dr. Mitchell Glickstein

Robin
Lindley is a Seattle-based writer and attorney, and the features
editor of the History News Network (hnn.us). His articles also have
appeared in Crosscut, Real Change, Documentary, Writer’s Chronicle,
and others. He has a special interest in the history of medicine, and
particularly in brain research history. His email:
robinlindley@gmail.com.

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We are our brains. Dr. Mitchell Glickstein

It seems that we read almost weekly accounts of the work of today’s
neuroscientists who report stunning advances in our understanding of
the brain and the nervous system as well as the hope of someday
eradicating intractable diseases from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
to mental illness. Popular and academic interest in neuroscience has
grown immensely in recent decades.

Neuroscience has come a long way since about 335 BC when Aristotle
surmised that the heart is the seat of mental processes. And even in
the past century, since Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal identified the
nerve cell, neuroscience has evolved from a branch of biology to a
multidisciplinary science that now includes disciplines such as
chemistry, pharmacology, computer science, psychology, philosophy,
anatomy, physics, genetics, engineering, and more. In the not too
distant past, researchers often worked in isolation and usually
studied only one area of the brain but, with new technology,
scientists now can monitor the entire brain and study the components
of cells and subcellular structures as well as the processes of cell
communication.

History is the best way to learn about the complex field of
neuroscience, asserts renowned neuroscientist Dr. Mitchell Glickstein
in his sweeping new book, Neuroscience – A Historical
Introduction (MIT Press). Dr. Glickstein, has commented,
“Neuroscience is a human creation. It is of value to understand how
it came about.” His book delves into the science and serendipity
through the ages that has led to discoveries about the brain and
nervous system that provide the basis for our knowledge today.

In his book, Dr. Glickstein carefully describes the structure and
function of the brain as he explains how we’ve gained this
knowledge. He explores the process of discovery from ancient times to
the present, such as how physicians learned about brain processes by
studying injuries; how scientists built on the neuroanatomical
studies of nerve cells; and how experiments on the brains of other
mammals and invertebrates advanced human neuroscience. Dr. Glickstein
presents the history by beginning with an overview of the nervous
system and nerve cells and then discussing specific topics such as
electrical and chemical transmission in the nervous system; the
senses; movement; memory; neurological disease; personality and
emotion; mental illness; and consciousness.

Dr. Glickstein’s book has been praised for its research,
readability and deft introduction of the basic concepts and history
of neuroscience, and as a valuable resource for general readers and
neuroscientists alike. Neuroscientist
Dr. Michael N. Shadlen commented: “Neuroscience by
Mitchell Glickstein is a delightful mixture of the factual and
historical underpinnings of neurology and neuroscience from one of
the field's greatest scholars.” And neuroscientist Michael
Gazzaniga wrote that he found the book, “Authoritative,
highly readable, wonderfully illustrated, and just plain interesting.
Students of neuroscience will finally learn where all those ideas and
terms came from that we now use with regularity. Only Glickstein
could have achieved all of this."

Dr. Mitchell Glickstein, an
Emeritus Professor of Neuroscience at University College London,
is a leading authority on neuroanatomy and the history of
neuroscience. He has held
research and teaching positions at Cal Tech, Stanford, University of
Washington, Brown University, and Dartmouth College.
He
began his studies with Dr. Garth Thomas and Dr. Roger Sperry,
Nobel Prize-Winning neuroscientist for his split-brain experiments.
Much of Dr. Glickstein’s work has involved the study of the brain’s
processing of visual information and the role of the cerebellum in
vision and the sensory guidance of movement.

Dr. Glickstein generously responded by email from London to a series
of questions on his career and his new history of neuroscience.

Robin
Lindley: You’re an acclaimed neuroscientist. How did you come to
write a book of history on neuroscience?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: I have taught Neuroscience for many years. A
historical approach seemed the most effective in helping students
understand the field of neuroscience. The experimental and clinical
foundations of the field are often easy to understand, and they make
the current advanced textbooks more accessible.

Robin
Lindley: Rather than a strictly chronological history, you present
the history in terms of structure, function and pathology. How did
you decide on this approach?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: There seems to me to be two historical
approaches to teaching the history of neuroscience. What did we know
in 1850? What did we know in 1860, etc.? Alternatively, the way I
structured the book seemed preferable to me. Each scientist or
clinician was most influenced by the previous ones within their
field. The history may contain great gaps. In 1892 Cajal described in
exquisite detail the structure of the vertebrate retina. It was a
hundred years before physiologists had the methods with which they
could begin to interpret the anatomical structure.

Robin
Lindley: Some people confuse neuroscience with the medical
discipline of neurology and it actually involves much more. What is
neuroscience and what do neuroscientists do?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Neurology is the medical specialty that
deals with the diagnosis and treatment of patients with neurological
disease. Neuroscience is the study of the structure and function of
the brain and spinal cord. It is a basic science for neurology.

Robin
Lindley: You did many things before deciding to become a
neuroscientist, including teaching history. How did you come to study
and then work in neuroscience?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: I graduated from the University of Chicago
as a mediocre student with a completely unspecified bachelor’s
degree. Pass fourteen exams and you have a B.A. What the University
of Chicago did give me was a feeling that textbooks are not enough
for learning. Virtually all of our reading assignments were to
original sources.

In the two years
before entering graduate school I traveled and took courses at
N.Y.U.in mathematics and psychology. I applied to Chicago graduate
school in psychology. As a graduate student I had the feeling that
many of the approaches to psychology were limited. Study of the brain
seemed the main route for advancing the science. I was fortunate in
having a job in my final year of graduate school with Garth Thomas
where I began to learn about the brain. I was fortunate in being able
to continue learning about the brain working at Cal Tech with Roger
Sperry.

Robin
Lindley: What is some of your major work as a neuroscientist?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: The central focus of my work has been in
vision. How is vision processed by the brain, with particular
emphasis on visual control of movement and the role of the visual
input to the cerebellum in that control.

Robin
Lindley: Who do you consider the earliest neuroscientist in
history?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Neuroscience as a discipline emerged as a
combination of anatomy, physiology and pharmacology after the Second
World War. But its roots go much deeper. In my book I show an
Assyrian sculpture from the British Museum of about 600 B.C. A
lioness is shown with a spear cutting across her spine. The hind paws
are obviously paralyzed; the front paws are not. The sculptor was not
a neuroscientist, but was a careful observer.

Robin
Lindley: What traits do you think the greatest neuroscientists
share?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: As a model, I think of other areas of
biology; best is Charles Darwin. He combined years of careful study
of animals and plants culminating in a profound insight. With Darwin
as the standard, the great neuroscientists share these traits to a
greater or lesser extent; perhaps a few hundred milli-darwins.

Robin
Lindley: What are a few things historians should know about
neuroscience, especially in terms of learning and memory?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: There are often false starts and
over-interpretation. Scientists may claim more than they should. The
early behaviorists, for example, made useful contributions to
understanding of learning, but were over-confident in the explanatory
power of their science. John B. Watson derived a system of child
rearing, which in retrospect borders on the silly.

Robin
Lindley: There are some persistent myths about the brain including
the idea that we use only ten percent of our brain capacity. What’s
the reality that neuroscience has revealed?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: A myth indeed. Some of it comes from the
remarkable functional recovery people may make after brain injury.
The brain does not re-grow, but lost function may return. This
plasticity is most striking in children. A small child who loses an
entire left hemisphere, may yet develop normal speech.

There
are other myths. Neuroscientists often solemnly stated or wrote that
the cerebellum is not necessary for normal movement because people
may be born without a cerebellum, develop normally, and are
discovered only at autopsy to lack a cerebellum. Also a myth.

Robin
Lindley: What is neuroplasticity and how did scientists learn
about this remarkable brain process?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Neuroplasticity is a general concept
relating to the fact that the brain is organized to learn. Plasticity
refers to the mechanism of what happens at a cellular level in the
brain that is associated with learning.

Robin
Lindley:It seems brain function is often discovered as the result
of brain trauma. There’s the famous frontal lobe injury suffered by
Phineas Gage in the nineteenth century that led to better
understanding of the brain’s role in memory and personality, and
you describe Dr. Tatsuji Inouye’s study of bullet wounds to the
brain during the Russo-Japanese War to determine visual loss. What
are some examples of important discoveries about the brain from
injury that impressed you?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: There are many. The early Greek physicians,
for example, knew that a head injury may result in loss of function
on the opposite side of the body. My book has other examples. For
example a patient with unquenchable thirst after head injury, and a
woman without fear with the absence of a particular brain region.

Robin
Lindley: You’ve said that Dr. Santiago Ramon y Cajal may be the
most important neuroscientist in history. What did he do and why is
his work so significant?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Camillo Golgi had discovered the silver
based staining method that is named for him. Cajal used the method to
describe in remarkable detail the cellular structure of the brain and
spinal cord. His textbook, published over a hundred years ago, first
in Spanish, then in French and lately in English remains the standard
for detailed description of neural structure. He coupled this work
with a deep intuition about how nerve cells connected to one another.

Robin
Lindley: Was Dr. Ramon y Cajal’s work the foundation for the
discovery of neurotransmitters?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Not directly. Cajal argued forcibly that
neurons may touch one another, but that they do not fuse. He thus
raised the question of how they communicated. It was progress in the
pharmacology of the autonomic nervous system that led to modern
understanding of the role of transmitters in linking neurons to one
another and to muscles.

Robin
Lindley: You were a colleague of Dr. Roger Sperry, a Nobel
Prize-winning neuroscientist who is famous for his split-brain
experiments. What did his research show and why are his findings so
important for neuroscience today?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Before the work in Sperry’s lab there was
no evidence that memory could be localized to a particular region of
the brain. Ronald Myers, working with Roger Sperry in the 1950s,
showed that a memory trace can be formed in one side of the brain,
and remain inaccessible to the other. Based on these discoveries,
Mike Gazzaniga, also working with Sperry, explored the independent
capacity of each human cerebral hemisphere.

Robin
Lindley: You are an expert on vision and movement.How does
the brain process visual images and how did we learn this?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: By the beginning of the nineteenth century
the location of the primary visual area in the human brain was
established. The next phase in understanding were due to clinical
studies by physicians like Tatsuji Inouye and Gordon Holmes who
studied blindness within the visual field caused by brain injury.
Experimental study of the response of single neurons in the primary
visual cortex, especially that of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel,
began to uncover the cellular basis of visual processing in the
primary visual cortex. But there are vast areas in the parietal and
temporal lobes that are involved in further processing of vision.
Semir Zeki was a pioneer in showing the number of these visual areas,
and the nature of the responses of the cells within them.

Robin
Lindley: What are a few things neuroscientists are learning now
that may be helpful in addressing diseases such as dementia and
mental illness?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: I believe that the next generation will see
major advances in the understanding and then the treatment of
neurological and psychiatric diseases at a cellular and molecular
level. There are insights from the study of patients that one small
mutation in one gene can lead to a devastating neurological disease.
Understanding at that level may help to suggest mechanisms for
treatment.

Robin
Lindley: Who are your inspirations as a neuroscientist and a
historian?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: I remain an avid consumer of popular history
in books and TV. Most influential for me in the history of science
are former colleagues. Harry Patton was chairman of the Physiology
Department at the University of Washington. His lectures to the
medical students were inspirational for me. He didn’t teach simple
textbook physiology. He taught not just what we know, but how we know
it. What were the clinical and scientific studies that led to our
current understanding of brain function?

Robin
Lindley: There’s a sense that we’ve learned more about the
brain in the past two or three decades than in all the previous
centuries. What’s your sense of the arc of where neuroscience has
been and where it’s headed?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Neuroscience has gone from a study of
structure of the brain and spinal cord and the nature and connections
of the cells within it. The next major advances will be at the
molecular level; understanding the molecular basis of disease, and
suggesting routes for dealing with them.

Robin
Lindley: Is there anything you’d like to add for readers about
neuroscience and history or anything else?

Dr.
Mitchell Glickstein: Neuroscience is a fascinating branch of
biology dealing with the nature of human sensation, movement and
thought. But we are far from understanding it all. Now, as in the
past, some will claim more authority that they may not deserve. It is
important to distinguish established facts and principles from those
that are more speculative.

Robin
Lindley: Thank you Dr. Glickstein for your thoughtfulness and for
your new history of the marvelous world of neuroscience.